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Hong Kong is a place of sorrow in this, that most of its citizens by poll result at least, think the overall condition of trhe place has become worse since reunification with China (over 3/4 by Hong Kong University poll), while less than 1 in 5 express confidence in the Hong Kong Chief Executive's new ministerial team. Another poll shows that the proportion of those optimistic about their Hong Kong future has dwindled from 60 to 28%. House prices have plummeted, for many rich Hong Kong residents left the land before the 'fall' into China's hands, and the liberty many prize has not given, in its considerable restriction, the opportunity to fulfil it. With Hong Kong's traditional vigour and liberties under Britain, for expression and action, now compromised, many have also felt the appeal of mainland booms following China's acceptance into the World Trade Organization.

Indeed, Anson Chan, the former chief secretary of Hong Kong's civil service - declared that its inhabitants need to get more say in who governs them to regain lost confidence. "Somewhere along the way," he is reported to have said, "we seem to have lost our 'can do' spirit," she wrote in the Financial TImes. Perhaps this crisis of confidence comes from the distancing of anything on this earth, at their level, in which to PLACE it!

To be sure, there is still ostensible freedom of expression, re religion, speech and protest, unlike the case in the rest of China, but harassments continue, and the election of the governing body is not free, half of it being by direction from certain appointed quarters, and only half from the people direct. The Chief Executive is not elected, since pressure from China indicates its own choice. The procedures are not those of universal suffrage by any means, though movement towards this is contained in the Chinese basic law providing for review of electoral matters in 2007.

With unemployment in Hong Kong rising to 7.4% and pressure - the means of subverting liberty - from China being brought for Hong Kong to enact the anti-subversion law, which could enable prosecution of Falun Gong - though naturally enough in this web of intrigue, there is assurance it would not be used for such a purpose! - there is a sense of compromised future, at the massive level, of erosion of the diminishing mountain of Hong Kong's achievements, and at the more intimate, perhaps of a distillation out of life, in the interests of political conformism, communist control and diminishing value in life in the area.

Further, to many there is minute attraction in the sense of becoming more and more integrated with a China  which, after all, has bitterly persecuted Falun Gong, with a sort of perverted and ostentatious zeal, being challenged not by armies but ideas, not by disorder but by fear lest people seeking to find the meaning of life outside material things, should disrupt the Chinese communist control. Moreover, Falun Gong is merely one recent entry to the repression stakes. What China's Communists have done to the people of Christ, the non-conformist CHRIST ONLY as Lord Christians, who do not accept State domination of the content of their faith, is notorious and vicious, a subject of repeated report, whether from high-profile former inmate, missionary organisation or private source.
 

It rather reminds one of the early days of the French Revolution of 1789. There was a seething in the air, a sense of muted outrage at the atrocities performed in the interests of the governing authority's conception of things, the abuse of privilege, the suppression of liberty of religion, of thought, of action, all because some persons being in power, wanted to jag home their ideas as if they were injections of vaccine, not poison. In that day, the world conspiracy concerned was Romanism not least, allied with aristocracy; in this day, for China, it is Communism, allied with a thrust for hegemony. Each has asserted magical pretences^*1, based on nothing, accomplishing nothing: but the force of the misled has accomplished much murder in many generations (cf. More Marvels Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1032-1088H, 950ff.), without ever attaining to world rule.

China however has guarded, since the slaughter of Tiananmen, against any uprising, and the totalitarian directors of 1/5 or so of this world's population continue to thrust their evidentially inert, rationally inept and inhuman ideology into the minds of the people (cf. SMR pp. 925ff., 614, 707ff., 127ff., 307-308, 327ff. at 189, News 97, 82). The horrendous reality is this: that the rulers of China, never freely elected, a mere heady hegemony of political power seized by force, are denying a soul to their people, mocking the invisible realities from which arise their power and point in mocking (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9), using mind to deploy what denies mind, as if matter were more than an inference of mind based on its pre-assumed validity, and affirming the thoughts of their personalities as if personality had validity in a world which is basically inanimate, while pursuing 'guilt' in their victims, as if desire gave sanction to morality or matter had ethics.

This is an invasion on an unprecedented domestic scale of the order of billions, and the folly of the USA in granting most favoured nation treatment to such brigandage, wrought ruinously in their midst, may go down as one of the most ruthless failures in any free country in history.

Hong Kong now is beginning to subside, and Jiang Zemin has been good enough to offer aid if necessary to the once flourishing province, now degraded enough to have it even suggested that it needs it! More and more, says Zemin, you must integrate and find by your notable powers of adaptation, shown so well in the past, how to develop in your new situation. So the economic and financial ties with the mainland are to grow, the mainland itself in a hideous state of repression, so that the gradual movement in Hong Kong may be towards less and less passion for liberty, more and more ties to its absence, and all may drift to the death of liberty for such bodies as Falun Gong which, for all their oddities, are making one point which the government does not desire to hear.

• So does the government tack this way, and that in its yacht of State, using one wind, but many manoeuvres.

Is man to be sacrificed for this materialist moloch ? a State founded on folly, executing government by using the multiplied machinery of force, psychological and physical:
tainted with inhumanity,

• tainted with inhumanity,
• denying the very springs and heart of man, as well as the necessities of his Creator of valid thought, order and law, code and contrivance, form and continuance, information and technology, greater in 'nature' than in man's own performance,
• making of man the product of stones, of the inanimate, the law-limited ground-floor of the universe,
• immune to spirit, while using it,
• brandishing the products of mind in orders carrying moral force, while abusing all morality by denying for it any possible basis (cf. News 19).

Let us use the utmost charity. Suppose that to a man, the governing communist regime thinks that it will provide unity, and allow the masses of Chinese to develop food for their bodies, and perhaps do something as a nation which otherwise confusion might prevent. Let us graciously allow such a thought. What then ? They STILL are dictating with force, denying what man is, implementing a lie, performing a sort of spiritual lobotomy, a moral leucotomy, the replacement of reason with rule, of reality with illusion, of  evidential hopes with contra-evidential theories, as if inebriated by a false spirit, a mind immune to logic. They are STILL leading the people in an atheistic rebellion against reality which can ONLY bring pain, suffering, torment and the sort of upset which, initially at least, has some sense of unfulfilled longing, acquired by the sale of the soul!

Thus, even now in Hong Kong, we read of protests against Beijing's "murderous regime" (Guardian July 1, 2002) and campaigning for improved human rights, outside the precincts of the official program of celebration. Human rights ? There are none.

First, there are none in this dehumanising of man, carried out in theory, but of course not in practice, since man remains man whatever the vacuity of his thinking: for it confers no rights. The individual is ignored; but why the State should not also be ignored is an unanswerable question. If one is nothing, so are two. Number does not make man, nor do statistics make truth, except concerning the operation of hands which rise or fall, move this way or that; and that is irrelevant to issues, though not to motion.

Secondly, however, even before God man has no rights. When you are a product, you cannot clamour rationally with your Producer, WHEN His is the universe and all in it. To what would you appeal ? To HIS principles ? He executes them. To YOURS ? On what do you find basis, when all your thought, reasoning, evidence and constraints are derivations from Him ?

Yet there IS something far better than these ludicrous rights, human rights. It is HUMAN conferment. When God made man, He did it for a reason. Man expresses Him in thought, in spirit and in person. He does it only in a very limited way; but he does it. It is because of God that thought can have validity; since the basis is not the irrational, but the rational, and the instrument of man's mind has only to be tuned into the instrumentation of God's world, to find the due accord of thought and data, and the ordered explicabilities inherent in the double result, mind and body, of one source, setting it also in one environment.

What then does this show ? Man has a PLACE in his plight. The plight results from misuse of his powers such as communism almost farcically illustrates, with all other naturalism and materialism (cf. Index). The place arises from his construction with rationality, for rationality, and with will. Thus both the internal and the external environment express rationality, and the one can communicate with the other most aptly. Susceptibility to reason is not produced by its absence, nor capacity to apply it by a world to which it is alien; just as power to inter-relate the domains of mind and matter is not secured by incoherence.

But what does mere rationality confer ? It confers the power to think, and the evidence and the very laws of logic  compel you to the Bible (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10), and exclude every other option. In short, God has spoken. But what has He said ?

He has made it clear that the gift of life, reason and universe is NOT for fun, NOT for pretend-we-are-god sessions, not for man having mandate to destroy man, or one fifth of it, by lies and fraudulent assertions, backed by force. All this is allowed in a scenario which exhibits the vacuity of man without God, perfectly; but the permission is not the approbation.

Man is for God. Now rationally, there is nothing else to prefer, for not only is the elevation of the mere products of God to the place of God inane, it is vain, a pretension of the uttermost dimension. It means you are awry in the universe, like steering in desperate need of alignment. In a parable: You chafe and you churn, and you tipple and topple, you hit other cars, and their owners sue you and you lament and you pine. Your car spoils, your spirit is soiled, your mind is troubled and your future is erratic. Ignoring the testimony of the mechanic, and behind him the car manufacturing plant, and behind that, the owner of it is an exercise in futility.

Rebellion when the product is secured by a redemption payment made by the manufacturer, made at cost, and searching to the heart, is mere pretext. Autonomy is outrageous pretence; wisdom then is meretricious muddle.

Repeatedly God insists to His people that it is time they realised the folly of their thought fashions, spiritual creations and personal miscreancy (cf. Isaiah 1, Amos 4, Proverbs 1), and He mocks their pretended powers by giving rewards to those, even the rebellious,  who have done this or that, at His plan; and distresses others by forecasting their temporary or permanent abasement as nations (cf. SMR pp.  713ff., Isaiah 34, 14, Ezekiel 26:14ff., 29:15ff., 29:18-19).

Thus, as to the Communist hierarchy in China,  even if their motives were perfected in benevolence, selfless sacrifice, devoted hopes for their people, yet would their dictation be a crucible of horror, a presumption to whiten all faces and grieve the heart, that in mankind such an arrogantly demanding abortion of reality should be made governmentally mandatory. To be sure, the abortion is only in their own womb, since God does not change; yet equally, these people matter who are so afflicted, and their sufferings count.

It is time for free nations to stop pretending. It is not only in Vietnam, in Ambon, in Yugoslavia and its surrounds, in Africa and in the many lands under the equally horrendous Moslem force into the arena of faith, that man is being sacrificed to misled authoritarianism, or tedious totalitarianism: it is also in China. What a fiasco, that one of the few nations with veto power in the illustrious UN should be one of the chief violators of human dignity, liberty and place!

What a further fiasco that countries like Australia should be with the USA, combining in a war on evil which is misdefined as a particular sort of evil, so that with evil they hunt evil. It is rather like using criminals to find them, except that when you all have guns, who will shoot whom, first!

The only unity of importance is that which England and the USA at their best moments, tended to seek, and to exhibit. It is one with God, the Creator, the Redeeming God, without whom sin is mere slush, and all hope of human prosperity, meaning and purpose is mere confusion, endlessly aligned with vapid argumentation, dissolute deceit, artful scheming and sudden betrayals, as attested so often and not least in the ludicrous Russo-German non-aggression pact, the mini-endurance of which was one of the more humorous of the horrors of World War II.

Few nations have ever had so much liberty as these English-speaking ones attained; but now in both, its loss is beginning to become the more obvious, as the folly of mere licentiousness, human autonomy and self-pleasing becomes more evident (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 3). Both nations are compromising any sign of deep commitment to God, and the results are showing it (cf. Cascade of Truth ... Ch. 10, Red Alert ... Ch. 6, Wake Up  World!... Ch. 3, The Other News 13).

Now the movement is from Britain to EUROPE (cf. SMR pp. 923ff., 955ff.), from the USA to the UN, with Bush's glowing commendations and aspirations, from moral demands to commercial hopes, from truth to pragmatic utility. In the affairs of man, it is one of the utmost ironies that when you sell truth, auction your soul, seek peace for practical reasons and ignore reality for candid gain, then your gain is dross, and you lose what you could have used with which to appreciate it: your own soul. Yourself gone, what is the world! What does a man profit, said Christ, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul!

So does the water leave the pure mountains, the springs of delightful altitude, ultimate meaning in the heights, and losing its way wend into the wildwoods of confusion, pollution of principle, depletion of truth, renegacy of spirit.

Let it, if it will. As to yourself, reader, remember the horror expressed in Jeremiah, and instead of unhallowed pastimes of political manoeuvre, selfish satisfactions of mere gain, psychic choices of mean dimensions and little worth, seek the Lord.

“ 'What injustice have your fathers found in Me,
That they have gone far from Me,
Have followed idols,
And have become idolaters?
Neither did they say, ‘Where is the Lord,
Who brought us up out of the land of Egypt,
Who led us through the wilderness,
Through a land of deserts and pits,
Through a land of drought and the shadow of death,
Through a land that no one crossed
And where no one dwelt?’

" 'I brought you into a bountiful country,
To eat its fruit and its goodness.
But when you entered, you defiled My land
And made My heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’
And those who handle the law did not know Me;
The rulers also transgressed against Me;
The prophets prophesied by Baal,
And walked after things that do not profit.

“ 'Therefore I will yet bring charges against you,' says the Lord,
'And against your children’s children I will bring charges.
For pass beyond the coasts of Cyprus and see,
Send to Kedar and consider diligently,
And see if there has been such a thing.
Has a nation changed its gods,
Which are not gods?
But My people have changed their Glory
For what does not profit.

" 'Be astonished, O heavens, at this,
And be horribly afraid;
Be very desolate,' says the Lord.
'For My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.

“ 'Is Israel a servant?
Is he a homeborn slave?
Why is he plundered?
The young lions roared at him, and growled;
They made his land waste;
His cities are burned, without inhabitant.
Also the people of Noph and Tahpanhes
Have broken the crown of your head.

" 'Have you not brought this on yourself,
In that you have forsaken the Lord your God
When He led you in the way?
And now why take the road to Egypt,
To drink the waters of Sihor?
Or why take the road to Assyria,
To drink the waters of the River?

" 'Your own wickedness will correct you,
And your backslidings will rebuke you.
Know therefore and see that it is an evil and bitter thing
That you have forsaken the Lord your God,
And the fear of Me is not in you,'
Says the Lord God of hosts."

Again, hear Him:

" 'Incline your ear, and come to Me.
Hear, and your soul shall live;
And I will make an everlasting covenant with you—
The sure mercies of David.

" 'Indeed I have given him as a witness to the people,
A leader and commander for the people.
Surely you shall call a nation you do not know,
And nations who do not know you shall run to you,
Because of the Lord your God,
And the Holy One of Israel;
For He has glorified you.

" 'Seek the Lord while He may be found,
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the Lord,
And He will have mercy on him;
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.

“ 'For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,' says the Lord.
'For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

" 'For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven,
And do not return there,
But water the earth,
And make it bring forth and bud,
That it may give seed to the sower
And bread to the eater,
So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth;
It shall not return to Me void,
But it shall accomplish what I please,
And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

“ 'For you shall go out with joy,
And be led out with peace;
The mountains and the hills
Shall break forth into singing before you,
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress tree,
And instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree;
And it shall be to the Lord for a name,
For an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.' ”

Israel has long seen the fruit of rebellion, its folly and its cost, but still has to take one more step before any security can be found^*2. The first and only vital security is spiritual, but in this case it has a terrestrial verification! (cf. SMR Ch. 9, Appendix A, Galloping Events Ch. 4). But for Jew or Gentile, male or female there is but one Gospel, one good news, one way out and one way in, and the way out is to come in (cf. Galatians 1, Romans 4).  As Christ declared it: "I am the door. By Me, if anyone enter, he will be saved, and go in and out and find pasture" (John 10:9, cf. 10:27-28). There is no back door here! and breaking does not enter, for the barriers are infinite.
 
 

*1
  In the Mass, contrary as shown in SMR 1032-1088H to the Bible, there is an appeal which aborts both scripture and observable fact. No test shows any change in the bread consecrated by Romanism, for mass. If, moreover,  Christ HAD meant to be taken literally, as if being described as a ‘door’ He would need grease to move, or as a vine, fertiliser, then here, with a body literally seen as ‘bread’, His breaking of bread would have been suicide, removing the possibility of the death on the Cross, for it is given to man once to die, and the Christ became a man (Hebrews 1-2, 9).

So too in Islam, the use of force in the faith area excludes the religion from consideration by reason (cf. SMR pp. 50ff., 65ff., More Marvels ... Ch. 4), for it would impugn God for not using it, but inflicting pain anyway; and God as seen in SMR Ch. 1, pp. 580ff., Repent or Perish Ch. 2,  would be self-contradictory if He were to  seek to misuse His creation. However , with Him there is no self to be constituted by any other, no gain to be wrought from what is comprehensively His own creation, and no contradiction which can impact on Him. Without limit, He is what He would be, and does what He will.

Moreover, to imagine that God is to be worshipped in terms of some book written by a militant man who subdued cities to enforce his ways, and showing no rational ground for belief in his book, which indeed is constantly contradicted by international failure of the Islam faith, when its lord is supposedly almighty, is to follow a dream. The Bible - see Meta-Religion, A Spiritual Potpourri 15, *1 - is the only basis for a religion which involves empirical verification on a massive scale, in detail, and provides an unimpugnable validity (see SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10).

Magic is the assumption of powers not human or inherent in the structure of the universe, and not assignable to any rationally depictable and evidenced being, which nevertheless supposedly occur. The Biblical religion on the other hand, relates to the ONLY rationally depictable Being, outside the structure of the universe and its observable powers, apart that is, from those to whom it makes reference itself, this being for such other supernatural powers, the ground of belief. In Repent or Perish Ch. 2, as in SMR Chs. 1,  3 and 10, with TMR Chs. 3 and 5, moreover, one sees that the Bible is NECESSARILY from Him. The same total incomparability occurs in the matter of the founder, Jesus Christ, His record and that of any other religious leader: if the object  is testimony to the Creator.

*2

Cf. Leviticus 26, which forecast just this, Deuteronomy 32, which did likewise, and included the next step, when the Lord intervenes for Israel, and Zech. 12:10, where a vast return to the Lord in Israel is exhibited, effectually complete with return to the crucified One.  See SMR pp. 502ff..